Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

Card walls common in agile software development are not kanban systems.

But I knew that these processes were derived from the same principles and that because team members understood those basic principles, they were therefore capable of adapting when reassigned from one team to another.

simple act of limiting work-in-progress with kanban encourages higher quality and greater performance.

doing this we can achieve a sustainable pace of development so that all individuals can achieve a work versus personal life balance.

should become evident in subsequent chapters, we use a kanban system to limit a team’s work-in-progress to a set capacity and to balance the demand on the team against the throughput of their delivered work.

However, if there is no explicit limit to work-in-progress and no signaling to pull new work through the system, it is not a kanban system. This is more fully explained in chapter 7.

Balancing demand against throughput implies that we will set the rate at which we accept new requirements into our software development pipe to correspond with the rate at which we can deliver working code.

Balance Demand against Throughput
Prioritize
Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability

The six steps in the recipe are
Focus on Quality
Reduce Work-in-Progress
Deliver Often

Measure and Manage Flow
Make Process Policies Explicit
Use Models[1] to Recognize Improvement Opportunities